Google’s November Update – Thanksgiving Recipe Bug!

By Web Editor on November 29, 2019

Here’s a summary of what’s covered in Google’s November Update from Barry Scwartz

“We got a little bit of news to talk to you about today it is Thanksgiving weekend so it’s been a short week but we have a little bit more information about the Google November update that I want to share with you.

The Google recipe bug where the images are not being displayed for recipe markup for a lot of lots of recipe sites it’s still ongoing and surpassed the Thanksgiving cooking season which is pretty bad.

Google also on the ad side has an over reporting bug we had a bunch of Google user interface tests and we were able to conduct a very very scientific and authoritative survey on which Googler would be the best SEO and who would actually win an SEO contest.

I want to share those results with you at the end so stay tuned.

First up I wanted to talk to you about the November update that’s been going on, it’s kind of died down recently but before that it was kind of like really fluctuating for the past couple weeks or so and whilst we’ve been talking about it to Glen Gabe asked John Mueller about this update and asked him it all a little bit if it was anything linked related.

John Mueller kind of said no not really… it’s possible or maybe there was other algorithm updates that happened but John Mueller basically said you should look at something else if you think it’s linked related.

Hmmmm….!

Of course, as you know there are baby algorithms so there could be linked algorithms that have updated… so Google said when they originally talked about this we just scrolled down to it you can see over here we’ve actually launched several updates in the past several weeks, so again it could be some things that are linked related.

There are numerous people in the SEO community so I think this November update was solely linked related.

On the other hand it probably wasn’t solely linked related, it probably was related to lots of things including core algorithmic update stuff around content and all that stuff.

But it Could be About Pandas….!

Oh… and it could be related to baby pandas it could be large pandas it could be small pandas it could be penguins it could be happy penguin sad penguins we don’t know…but again look at your site at a holistic approach if you have link problems fix those linked problems if you have content problems fix those content problems and fix it so there really wasn’t much new there that we learned.

But hey John Mueller, if you’ve watched that video we kind of downplayed the links specifically, I guess the November update this is sad reflection because we’ve been reporting about a recipe bug where Google would not show us.

Well basically what you would see is an image in the recipe markup but Google’s not showing it all the time and this is still going on reporting about this bug actually since late October this hack she is a recurring bug that happened earlier also in the year.

Google said they’re looking into and they were looking into it for a really long time, the issue is that it still an issue and it was an issue since late October getting reported about it in early November and Google has not fixed it yet and we just finished Thanksgiving and that’s the probably the prime time were people like you and me–well not me I don’t really cook–but people like you if you do cook are looking up recipes for your Thanksgiving dinner or whatever you’re doing for your celebrations.

So it’s sad that that surpassed and the Google did not fix it but Google said they are looking into it still and hopefully they will fix it.

John Mueller said there is no real difference between going ahead an uploaded a robots.txt file that hat is blank completely or not uploading at all versus allowing all… he said do whatever you want even fact you could actually leave the comments in there basically saying they’re in there are not robot.txt directors here.

If you wanted to write that you create whatever you want in there just make sure that you’re not using the wrong markup or just not use it at all that doesn’t make a difference John Mueller said.

SEO’s in general think that knowing in for about information retrieval the science behind it does help you become a better SEO.

Don Anderson posted a poll on Twitter asking about this and he says how important do you think awareness of I our information retrieval is for SEO’s ?

Most people think it’s very important, 35 percent said it’s important only 13 percent said it’s not important and 9 percent want to say is boulders and if not it’s irrelevant for SEO.

Obviously SEO’s are not always on the same page about SEO and that makes this feels fun.

Talking about fun, Google’s John Mueller said the she thought about in the past running their own internal SEO contest internally to see if Googlers themselves could build in our website and rank them and so forth John Mueller said we thought about it from time to time around internal SEO competitions where Google engineers would do this and he thinks and he thinks that it would be really useful to have real-world experience of making websites and using our tools plus guidance… however, he said ranking competitions are totally artificial and not representative of real-world situations.

We actually did a poll about this and I’ll show it to you later around this but it’s interesting to see that

Google fixed an issue with a Google Ads reporting issue around Google Ads over-reporting conversions this was an issue between November 11th and 20th.

Google back dated the data, fixed it, and it specifically in fact impacted tons of people.

Ginny Marvin said if you’re not using the last click you’re likely affected and basically Google was saying you it was over reporting your conversions so it means like “oh you’re gonna version we’re doing much much better and you thought it was” and this was for a literally over a week.

Google fixed it they backdated the data all the API should be resolved but if you did use the API and download data from it you’re gonna have to go ahead and resync that data so that you have the correct information.

This is funny… so I was doing some searches to see when these Christmas and Hanukkah and Kwanzaa decorations come up on Google, and I did a search for Christmas just to check and up came these ads.

These ads to basically show a lot of lingerie and a funny I guess costume here and so forth and I asked other people about this and tons of other people were seeing this as well people were seeing all forms of this including male costumes.

It’s pretty funny that Google is doing this I reported it it took about a couple hours for Google to remove it you don’t want your kids I don’t want my kids searching for Christmas or any holiday and finding that type of information especially my younger kids find that information on Google.

Of course this depends who you are and whatever but I don’t think it’s necessarily that appropriate.

Google’s testing new hotel features and filters with hover overlays I collected a bunch of tweets from bunch of SEO’s that are tracking this space you can see here lots of new filters around city stuff which is pretty cool here’s other filters there’s tons and tons of filters if you drill in you can actually drill into each one of these and see the different hotel features that Google’s doing including the ability to mouse over property and see more information.

Definitely take a look at this if you’re in the hotel space there’s lots of things constantly changing around Google’s hotel results so definitely take a look at that if you’re interested.

Google my business has added a new feature for service businesses including plumbers or web designers or whatever where they can actually add their own job types for services so if your plumber and you wanna things like “I repair toilet” or “I’ve installed faucets” you can actually go ahead and do that which is a new feature to actually launch yesterday or they announced yesterday on Thanksgiving which is pretty cool so you can add your own service offerings by using the service editor.

Google is offering searching tips and ideas for people who can’t find what they’re looking for so if you recall we caught a similar thing back in the day where if you’re doing a search for something and it looks like there aren’t any great matches for that search Google is gonna have an offer you tips to use how to actually search to get better results.

We’ve seen something similar to that before but this is pretty cool that Google is actually doing this.

Google is testing some new user interfaces in search one is they’re testing arrows and different UIs around kind of highlighting the snippet itself people think this is kind of distraction to say this is what our ads or what our organic results you will see little arrows next to the results…” Read More…